Owners and operators of websites find it to be very useful to collect information about the users that visit their websites. Many websites provide ways for users to provide information that may be collected from them in the form of surveys. Other websites are sophisticated enough to gather information about the user without user interaction. Some websites provide a hybrid, collecting information from the user and asking the user to answer some questions.
Various reasons for collecting information from users along with various techniques to collect the information have evolved since the mid-1990s and the boom of the Internet. One of the most common forms of collecting user information has been to ask the user to fill out a survey while the user is connected to the Internet. The survey is tailored to the needs of the website provider or entity. The user would fill out the survey either from a series of questions appearing on the screen display or from another pop-up window with the survey questions. Once the user answers the questions, a button on the screen would be selected with a mouse click and the information associated with the survey disappears. What the user does not see is that the survey information would be stored at a computing device along with the survey information from other users to be analyzed according to the desires of the website provider or other entity.
Another form of collecting information would use cookies to capture information associated with the user's interaction with the website. For example, the cookie might monitor a number of times the user visits the website, track the locations visited by the user within the website, or capture activities occurring during an interaction with the website such as purchasing music from a music website. The cookies would reside on the user's computer and be specifically created to perform the gathering tasks. Such a technique might be employed by the operators of MSN® from the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. MSN® receives billions of users at its website(s). As such, Microsoft would like to understand what kind of users interact with MSN® or what kinds of behaviors occur during the interaction. For example, a server may record a user's visit to a web page, a record may be made of an answer to a request between a client and a server, or a server might return results from a query.
The two forms of collecting information discussed above are just examples for how information might get collected. There are other ways of collecting information. And today, much of the activities of collecting and analyzing this information falls into a category called web analytics. Web analytics may be viewed as a study of the impact of a website on its users. Because of a large demand, various companies offer services to website operators for web analytics of a website.
Unfortunately, many websites (i.e. website providers) have found that collecting user information may be a monumental task. Depending upon how much information is wanted, a website might collect terabytes of information but only use a portion of it for its purposes. The fallout from collecting such a large amount of information is that resources must be provided to store the information, and the information is unwieldy in performing analyses. Many web site providers are looking for ways to gather the information they desire from users but not expend large amounts of resources to maintain the information.